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Chapter Sixteen

Roland

Dr. Larsen is being her usual self, and while I’d ordinarily find it unpleasant, I find it particularly unpleasant in this moment. I glare at Dr. Larsen, hating how chipper she’s being about this.

“Fascinating stuff. You’re saying the tattoo appeared first last week and that today it got darker?” She’s prodding at the skin on my left pec, and when she’s finished, she kicks off on her rolling stool, making her way to her computer in this office that’s also a lab that’s also an exam room.

“It’s not a tattoo, but yes.”

“And when it first appeared, did you feel it?”

“A little.”

“What did it feel like?”

“Itching.”

She shoves her glasses up onto her forehead. Her salt-and-pepper bangs flop back to brush her eyebrows as she shakes her head and gives me her best impersonation of a glare. It’s not particularly threatening. “You’re hiding something.”

“I’m not.” I am. I’m thinking about the fact that I spoke another language during sex. I’d said words I’d never heard before but knew what they meant. I want to ravage you . I’d have told her I loved her in that same tongue, but there’s no word for love in that language.

“You are. Why won’t you tell me?” She cocks her head and narrows her eyes, and this look feels much more sinister because she’s thinking and she’s smart.

I try to distract her. “I got two more today on either rib.” Where Nessa held on to me. “They look identical.”

“Really?” Successfully distracted, Dr. Larsen ducks her head and swivels back over to me, poking my left rib until I squirm. “Incredible. And you’re sure that these markings appeared here after they appeared on your chest?”

“Yeah.”

“And they don’t cause you any pain?”

“No. Just itch sometimes.” Like when Vanessa stares at me too long with that funny look she gets when she’s deciding something—or anytime she does what I say. I don’t think she realizes what she’s doing to me when she does that. I couldn’t give a shit about the sexual aspects of it—okay, that’s a lie—but I don’t think she realizes that every time she opens for me on my command, she’s giving me her trust.

“What prompts it?”

“Random.” I shrug, forcing casual with every fiber of my being. I think this time she buys it.

“Fascinating,” she says, snapping on gloves. “I’m going to take some photos and a biopsy.” She drags a big metal arm, which I thought was an X-ray machine, down from the ceiling, but she swivels it around my body, taking pictures.

“Have you seen this type of thing before?” I ask Dr. Larsen.

She shakes her head and shoves the camera back toward the ceiling when she’s finished. “Nope.”

“You seem to be taking it in stride.”

She smiles, rounding her desk to return to her computer. Her teeth are a bit crooked in the front. She has freckles. She’s also definitely ... weird. Whether because her surprising and borderline erratic behavior reminds me of Vanessa or not, she’s been growing on me.

“I wouldn’t have taken a posting at the COE if I’d thought I wouldn’t see the strange and beautiful. You know when people say nothing surprises me, that expression?” She doesn’t wait for me to answer. “Well, the truth is that here, things surprise me every damn day, and I love it.” She sighs, staring almost lovingly at her computer screen, on which I can see my abs and the funky markings on them in a slightly darker shade of brown than my skin in the reflection of her glasses. “I have the coolest job in the world.”

I snort.

“You really don’t have any idea what precipitated the forming or disappearance of these markings?” she asks again.

“Nope.”

She raises an eyebrow, making me wonder if this woman is twenty or seventy. She’s got the confidence of one or the other. “You’re lying again. That must mean it’s something good. Did they appear the first time you pooped your pants?”

“What? No.”

“The first time you had a wet dream?”

Sort of. “No.”

“Does it have to do with your heroic acts?”

That ... stalls me. I blink.

Dr. Larsen claps her hands. “It does? They appear when you do something heroic?”

“I ...” I shake my head and then sigh, defeated. “Not ... really.”

Nessa’s breath.

Nessa’s touch.

Nessa’s trust.

I wish I could say that I wasn’t so obsessed with her, but that’s a lie too. I crave my new obsession, fully committing to it like I’ve never committed to anything before in my life.

“Then what?”

I can feel my skin prickle, and I’m glad my skin tone doesn’t reveal the depth of my blush. “Nessa. Vanessa,” I correct. These changes happening to my body seem more pronounced anytime I get the urge to protect her. I’d never had the desire to protect or defend anything before her.

I felt it the first time she tripped, swooning when she saw me, and that strange and terrifying energy passed between us. My body moved before I had even registered what I was doing. Lunging forward. I had to catch her.

I shrug. “That’s all I got.”

I swear the look on her smug face is the reason I haven’t said anything until now. She takes her glasses clear off, a practiced move, I’m guessing, and crosses one knee over the other. She rests her elbow on top of it and says in a singsong voice, “Diamond was right.” And then she laughs. “Damn. I owe that woman fifty bucks.”

I frown.

Dr. Larsen elaborates, “I thought your relationship was fake. My wife, Diamond, a hopeless romantic, was convinced it was real. She was ready to throw down over it. Well, throw me down anyway.” She waggles her eyebrows at me in a way that I truly hate.

“Pervert.”

She laughs hard and shakes her head, a pink tint in her cheeks when she looks back at me and says, “You’re telling me that you get permanent tattoos when your girlfriend touches you, and I’m the one with the problem?”

I huff half a laugh myself as she tilts her head. She doesn’t make any notes on her computer, and I really fucking like that. “Does she have anything to do with your dreams?”

The dreams were why I’d come to see Dr. Larsen in the first place. Vivid and terrible, they were dreams of darkness and of murder. I’d been so full of rage in the dreams, and I could see myself lashing out and attacking strange and terrible monsters that were also trying to attack me. And every time, I’d woken from those dreams angry and stayed angry until I saw her face. For whatever reason, she sparked the dreams, but she could also make the rage they brought go away.

“I didn’t dream last night when I slept beside her. At least, I don’t think I did.”

“Hm.” Dr. Larsen’s mouth scrunches up.

“Hm? That’s the best you got, Doc?”

“Call me Emily, and yeah, sort of. I can’t say that there’s a manual for this, and if there is, I’m sorry to tell you, but you and I are the ones writing it. The COE hasn’t exactly been forthcoming with information either.”

I grunt, frowning. “Don’t you have all the files?”

“Most, but some are redacted, and Mr. Singkham won’t explain why—though he might not even know. Those files were originally redacted by the SDD before the Champions Coalition got them. You also might remember we don’t have the villains’ records either; those were stolen in the VNA raid of the SDD twelve years ago along with all that equipment.” The pods. I remember. The villains went back for some of the pods we’d landed in as little alien kids, lost in the cosmos. I’ve never given much thought to what they took but am suddenly struck by the feeling that they might be kind of important.

Fuck. Makes me wish I hadn’t severed ties so irrevocably with the Marduk.

Emily continues, “I’ll do a biopsy on the tissue, but I’m not expecting miracles. I’ll also poke around in the Forty-Eight archives and see if I can’t find anything to explain this or any evidence it might have happened to another Champion.” Her graying hair is in a ponytail on top of her head, held together with a bright-green scrunchie that’s fighting a losing battle against the mass as she works.

Not meeting my gaze as she takes a few notes, she adds, “I’d tell you that you’re free to go if you weren’t looking at me like you’re debating whether or not you’re going to gouge my eyes out or ask me a question. So.” She spins fully around on her stool, something a little kid might do, and, on the upswing, smacks her clipboard down onto the counter, her bright brown eyes all but glowing with a curiosity she’s trying her damnedest to suppress.

Go on. Throw her a bone.

“There’s something else.” I clear my throat and hold out my hands. She blinks. “You want a manicure? I’m very regretful to inform you, but I pay someone to do this.” She holds up her own hands in a mirror of how I’m holding mine, and I see that her hands are, in fact, tipped in short bright-green fingernails that match the color of the scrunchie in her hair.

She waggles them at me, and I scowl. “I don’t need my nails done.” And then I pause. “Actually.” I clear my throat. “I do. But every day. Every damn morning I wake up, and my nails are pointy.” I swallow as she watches my face, expression unchanging. “And hard.”

“Pointy and hard?”

I nod.

“And you’re describing your fingernails, yeah?” She snorts, and it takes me a full breath to realize she’s made a joke.

“Perv,” I huff, trying to keep the smile from twisting my lips.

She rolls forward and takes my right hand between both of hers, without gloves on, and smooths the side of her thumb around the top curve of my fingers. “Well, well ... ow!” She jolts on her first pass around my thumb and looks at the pad of her own. She shows it to me after a cursory glance, and I see that it’s got blood on it. She’s also grinning ear to ear.

“Jesus.” I jerk my hand out of hers, fucking petrified, but she grabs my right hand and pulls it back. “They weren’t sharp like that this morning, I swear.” I swear ... I hope. I had these fingers in-fucking-side Vanessa. What if ... no. No, she’d have said something. I can barely get the lump down in my throat.

Emily’s eyes sparkle with fascination. “My, my, my. You trim your nails every morning then?”

“After joining with the Champions, I noticed my nails getting darker in color. Tinting to almost black. Didn’t bother me, but in the week leading up to Washington, I started having to file them every other day, maybe less. I didn’t file them when I was out there saving those people, obviously, and when I got on the plane to come home, I noticed they were long—like half an inch. I cut them on the plane using a goddamn knife one of the security women had on her, and then I cut them again this morning.” A couple hours before I touched Vanessa, I’d rifled through her bathroom and found a set of clippers; they weren’t hard to find in a neatly marked container labeled Nails . My little psycho.

“So this growth is, what—six hours?”

“Something like that.”

“Your nails are already an eighth of an inch past the nail bed ...”

“And I cut them to the quick this morning.”

“And you say they get pointy if you let them?”

“They were on the plane.”

“Pointy how?” It fills me with a strange relief how seriously she’s taking this.

“I don’t know, like wide and then to a short point.”

“Almond shaped, maybe? Or diamond?”

“I don’t know. Almond, maybe. Wider, though.”

“Hm.”

She looks at me as she grabs a tool from a drawer under her desk. They look like little pincers. “Come sit down here and put your hand on the exam table,” she says, gesturing to a short stool the same height as hers and the metal table next to the exam bed.

“You gonna chop it off?” I say, taking a seat and swiveling over to the metal surface.

“Would you miss it?”

“Yes.” I lay my hand down anyway, but it twitches.

She laughs. “I meant the nail.” She shows me what’s in her hand, and it looks like one of those things you use to take the calluses off your feet.

I give her my hand, and she takes a few shavings from my nails, whittling them each down back to the quick. “I’m gonna ask you to do something you aren’t going to want to say yes to.”

“Then I’ll spare you the grief. No.”

She rolls her eyes. “Let your nails grow out one week.”

“One week? You kidding me? I’m not gonna wait a week to touch Vanessa.”

She snaps her little plastic box of my nail shavings shut and points at me with her file. “You are going to get your girlfriend injured. I touched your thumb a few hours after you last filed it. If it cut me with only a slight amount of pressure, it could cut her, too, if you’re engaged in more intimate activities.” My face burns. “We need to figure out what your nails are made of, then we can devise a plan or even a coating to go over them, if needed, to make sure you can live your life and engage in all the benefits of a new relationship safely .”

My face is hot as fire. And not in the way I find comforting. “Fine. A week.”

“A week. And in the meantime, you’ll engage in hands-free activities.” She raises both eyebrows, and the smile on her lips is too large, even though I can tell she’s trying not to tease me.

“Pervert.”

She laughs again, even more boisterously this time. “Call me if anything changes with you. Have you told Vanessa yet?”

I shake my head and am surprised when Emily doesn’t berate me for keeping secrets but says instead, “You can tell her I need to check her ankle, and I’ll give you the results of your sample Friday. We can check your nail growth then too.”

“Thanks, Emily.”

“No problem, Roland.” She swivels back to her laptop, and it’s like she’s forgotten I’m still in the room. I haven’t left yet, my hand still on the doorknob as I turn to her. She finally registers I’m still here and cocks her head. “Can I help you?”

“You got a good recommendation for a restaurant?”

“What kind?”

I shrug. “Italian? Anything a smart, shy girl not used to dating might like?”

“And I’m assuming money is no object.”

I give her a flat look.

She grins. “Just checking. After all, not even you might get in to some of these places looking like a grizzly.”

“What?”

“You look like you haven’t seen a comb in forty years.”

“I’m not forty.”

“You don’t know how old you are. For all we know, you could be 340. Gravity could work very differently on your planet—not to mention all the time you spent in interspace travel ...”

“Emily,” I bark, hoping to derail what was sure to be an hours-long physics explanation.

“Right. Well, if you can procure a pair of normal nonsweatpants in the next hour or so, and possibly a haircut, I’d try these.” She pulls out her notepad—the one for prescriptions , which feels decidedly appropriate—and starts scribbling. When she’s finished, she tears my newest scrip from the pad and hands it up to me. “That should get you started.”

I stare down at the list, but all I can think is that I’ve got no clue where to get a haircut, and when I had the COE send a car for me earlier, I had them bring me more sweatpants. I open my mouth, but Emily gets there first. “I’ll call Shandra. She’ll meet you in design in ten minutes to update your, uh ... look.”